Salon Kitty first published by Movie Gazette, April 2005 Berlin at the outbreak of World War II. Following orders from his superiors which he hopes to turn to his own political advantage, SS Officer Helmut Wallenberg (Helmut Berger) establishes a brothel for use by Nazi officials and foreign dignitaries, and selects a group of twenty…
People On Sunday (Menschen Am Sonntag) first published by Movie Gazette Despite its title, People On Sunday actually begins on the day before. When taxi driver Erwin Splettstößer arrives home from work on Saturday evening, his partner, the languid model Annie Schreyer, wants to go to the cinema to see the latest Greta Garbo picture,…
Suspiria first published by Little White Lies ‘Simulacrum’ is the single word that elderly psychologist Dr Jozef Klemperer (played by one Lutz Ebersdorf, in fact a pseudonym for Tilda Swinton) writes in his case notes as he listens to an unhinged Patricia Hingle (Chloë Grace Moretz) rave in his apartment cum consulting room. In this…
Demons first published by VODzilla.co Demons (Dèmoni) is set in Berlin, in the Deep Eighties (you can tell by Claudio Simonetti’s synth pop). Music student Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) is on the S-Bahn, clutching her score for Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, when the lights dip in a tunnel, and she glimpses the reflection of a man with…
Dance en abyme: Suspiria (2018) and reflections on rebirth Remakes always come with an in-built tension. Cleave too close to the original, and your film seems pointless. Cleave too far from it, and the film barely seems a remake. The ideal is to find a balance, somewhere between these two poles: a film that still…
Possession first published by LWLies. If Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession was to prefigure Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire by six years in its use of a divided Berlin to symbolize all manner of dualities, then it would also find itself occupying a strange borderland between the arthouse and the grindhouse. On the one hand it is…
Review of this extraordinary short neo-giallo first published on EyeforFilm. “I have sinned again… You cannot stop me. You need me. We need to see them suffer.” So says the heavy-breathing voice down the phone line to an ageing, bespectacled man (Stephen M Gilbert) who records the words on a small cassette player so he…